It only just launched, but already we’ve found an Easter egg in Twitter’s #Music platform. Blogger Tyler Hayes uncovered a hidden feature that transforms #Music into a service that “almost mimics Pandora.”
By appending the word “instant” to the end of a musician’s profile URL, Twitter #Music will transform into a music player that suggests a playlist of songs similar to the artist you’re checking out. So for instance, if you check out music.twitter.com/jtimberlake, you’ll see just a list of the musicians that he’s following – and you can from here listen to samples or full tracks from the people he’s following. Once you add “instant” to the end of that URL, i.e. music.twitter.com/jtimberlake/instant, Twitter #Music will add to your music player a list of artists that are similar to Justin Timberlake.
Since you can’t exactly edit a URL in the mobile app, this trick applies just Twitter #Music’s Web app.
Twitter clearly wants to sell #Music to users as a music discovery app. After all, it’s powered by what your friends and the community on Twitter are sharing. And because just about every feature inside of the app is using this massive amount of social data, a feature like Instant might have been seen as an outlier that didn’t quite fit into the larger scheme of Twitter #Music being a social music app.
Although Twitter is staying mum about how Instant works, taking a stab at Pandora this early in the newly launched app probably would have just ended up falling short of expectations anyway. Predictive radio is a tough nut to crack: Even Spotify has struggled to offer a product on par with Pandora’s. If you’ve checked out the hidden feature yourself, granted that you’re able to access the app, it isn’t difficult to see Twitter #Music Instant, though fun, isn’t able to help you discover similar artists all that well. It’s more of tagged on feature than a very functional one, at least at this point.
While Twitter is trying to grab a foothold as a music app, data from App Annie suggests that Twitter #Music isn’t going to coast on its early hype. After topping the iTunes top 100 free apps chart as the 5th overall downloaded app on the day of its launch, April 18, and the most downloaded in the music category, Twitter #Music is now nowhere to be found in the top 100. Is #Music a fad? As of this writing the app has plummet to the 134th place, and among music apps dropped to become the 11th most downloaded app.
